Servetus and Calvin; a study of an important epoch in the early history of the reformation

Front matter

SERVETUS AND CALVIN

By the same Author.

BENEDICT D'ESPINOZA ; his Life, Correspondence, and Ethics.

Preface

Some years ago I was led to make a study of the Life and Writings of Spinoza, and took considerable pains to present the gifted Jew of Amsterdam in such fulness to the English reader as might suffice to convey a passable idea of what one of the great misunderstood and misused among the sons of men was in himself, in his influence on his more immediate friends and surroundings through his presence, and on the world for all time through all his works. This study completed, and leisure from the more active duties of professional life enlarging with increasing years, I bethought me of some other among the sufferers in the holy cause of human progress as means of occupation and improvement. Spinoza led, I might say as matter of course, to Giordano Bruno, with whose writings I was familiar, and who was Spinoza's master, if he ever had a master. Ikit having, at a former period, undertaken viii PREFACE.

to edit the works of Harvey for the Sydenham Society, and the discovery of the circulation of the blood having become renewed matter of discussion with medical men and others, labourers in the field of general literature, I was turned from Bruno to Servetus, as the first who proclaimed the true way in which the blood from the right reaches the left chambers of the heart by passing through the lungs, and who even hinted at its further course by the arteries to the body at large.

Of Servetus at this time I knew little or nothing, save that he had been burned as a heretic at Geneva by Calvin ; and of his works I had seen no more than the extract in which he describes the pulmonary circulation. But meditating a revision and prospective publication of the Life of Harvey, with which I had prefaced my edition of his works, I went in search of further information concerning the ingenious anatomist who had not only outstripped his contemporaries, but his successors, by something like a century in making so important an induction as the Pulmonary Circulation, Nor had I far to go. In the ample stores of the British Museum Library I found a complete mine of Servetus-literature, and with access to the ' Christianismi Restitutio,' as reproduced by a learned physician, Dr. De Murr, and other works of the unfortunate

PREFACE. ix •

Servetus, I encountered not only the physiologist already known to me, but the philosopher and scholar, the practical physician, freed from the fetters of mediaeval routine, the geographer and astronomer, the biblical critic, in days when criticism of the kind, as we understand the term, was unimagined, and, alas for him ! the most advanced and tolerant of the Reformers, — that sacred band to which Servetus by indefeasible right belongs, Luther, Calvin, and the rest repudiated the discipline and most of the outward rites and shows of the Roman Catholic Church ; but they retained the most abstruse of her creeds. Servetus went at least as far as they in the rejection of externals ; but, appealing to the scriptures of the New Testament, he satisfied himself and dared to say to the world that some of the fundamentals of Christianity as formulated by the Church of Rome, and acquiesced in by the Reformers of Germany, had no warrant in the teaching of the Prophet of Nazareth. Rejecting, as he did, the whole of the post-apostolic dogmatic accretions of the ^ Church of Rome, Servetus is the source of the more ' reasonable service ' we are now permitted to render, and — strange conjunction ! — through his disastrous intercourse with Calvin, in no small measure the original of the free enquiry that is leading on to conclusions yet

X PREFACE.

uncontemplated as to man's relations to the Unseen and the Eternal.

The life and labours of the man of whom so much may be said can never be otherwise than interesting to the world. Nor is it in his life only that Servetus has been influential. His death has, perhaps, been even more influential than his life ; for when his pyre began to blaze, the beacon was lio-hted that first warned effectually from the shoals of bigotry and intolerance on which religion misunderstood has made shipwreck so long. The custom of consigning heretics, as dissidents in their interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures were called, to death by fire then began to fall into abeyance ; princes and chief magistrates ceased from assisting at autos-da-fe as edifying spectacles ; and persecution to less terrible conclusions — imprisonment, banishment, fine, and social ostracism — has been coming gradually, however slowly, to an end.

We have more than one book in English purporting to give an account of the life of Servetus, but none, I think, that is not either a compilation at second hand, or a translation wholly or in principal part from the French. No one among us appears to have referred to the works of Servetus and his contemporaries for the information that would have enabled him to give

PREFACE. xi

something like a true presentment of the man as he Hved and died. To do this — to make the EngHsh reader acquainted with another of the great devoted men who have toiled on life's pilgrimage with bleeding feet, to smooth and make straight the way for others, healers in the strife and in front of the battle, not to strike but to staunch the wounds that men in their ignorance and madness make on one another — such is the purpose of the work now presented to the reader.

In appealing mainly to the original sources of information on the life of Servetus, I have still not failed to make myself master of what has been done in later days by others in this direction. The references that occur in the course of my book to the writings of La Roche, Allworden, Mosheim, D'Artigny, Trechsel, Rilliet, and, last but not least, of Henry Tollin, make it unnecessary for me to do more in this place than to acknowledge my obligations to them.

One word on the portrait of Servetus. Of the original of this Mosheim gives a particular account ; but all ToUin's enquiries, as well as those I have made myself, lead to the belief that it is no longer in existence. Doubt has even been expressed as to the authenticity of this portrait of which we have indifferent engravings in Hornius' ' Kirchengeschichte,' in xii PREFACE.

Allworden's ' Historia,' and in Mosheim's ' Ketzergeschichte.' After careful study of these, my daughter has done her best to reproduce in the etching appended what must have been a striking and is certainly a typical Spanish countenance.

The etching of Calvin is after an engraving from one of the numerous more or less authentic portraits of the Reformer that are extant.

Barnes, Surrey : Midsummer 1877.

Book The First. Early Life Works Arrest And Trial At Vienne

ClIArTER PAGE

I. Michael Servetus : his Birth, Parentage, and

EARLY Education 3

II. Service with Friar Juan Quintana, Confessor

OF the Emperor Charles V 19

III. The Service with Quintana comes to an End . 29

IV. Intercourse with the Swiss Reformers • • • 33

V. The Reformers of Strasburg. Publication of the

Work on Trinitarian Error yj

VI. The Authorities of Basle. The Two Dialogues

ON the Trinity. Leaves Switzerland . . .71

VII. Paris. Assumption of the Name of Villeneuve

OR Villanovanus. Acquaintance with Calvin . 79

VIII. Lyons. Engagement as Reader for the Press with the Trechsels. Edits the Geography of Ptolemy 86

IX. Lyons. Dr. Symphorien Champier .... 99

•X. Return to Paris. Studies there. Jo. Winter of Andernach ; Andrea Vesalius. Degrees of M.A. and M.D. Lectures on Geography and Astrology 104

XI. The Treatise on Syrups, and their Use in Medicine MI

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE

XII. The Medical Faculty of Paris sue Servetus for

LECTURING ON JUDICIAL ASTROLOGY . . . Il6

XIII. Charlieu. Attainment of his thirtieth Year.

Views of Baptism 125

XIV. Settlement at Vienne under the Patronage of

the Archbishop. Renewal of Intercourse with THE Publishers of Lyons. Second Edition of Ptolemy 130

XV. Edition of Santes Pagnini's Latin Bible with

Commentary 139

XVI. Engagement as Editor by Jo. Frelon of Lyons.

XVII. ' Christianismi Restitutio,' the Restoration of Christianity. Discovery of the Pulmonary Circulation 191

XVIII. Calvin receives a Copy of the 'Christianismi

Restitutio' 231

XIX. Calvin denounces Servetus through William Trie

TO THE Ecclesiastical Authorities of Lyons . 235

XX. Arrestof Servetus and Arnoullet, THE Publisher. The Trial for Heresy at Vienne. Servetus is suffered to escape from Prison .... 252

XXI. Discovery of Arnoullet's private Printing Establishment. Seizure and Burning of the ' Christianismi Restitutio,' along with the Effigy of ITS Author 269

Book The Second

servetus in geneva, face to face with CALVIN.

I. Servetus reaches Geneva. Detained there, he is

arrested at the Instance of Calvin . . .281

II. Geneva, and the State of Political Parties at

the Date of Servetus' Arrest 287

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE

III. Servetus is arraigned on the Capital Charge

BY Calvin 304

IV. The Trial in its First Phase 314

V. The Trial in its Second Phase, with the Attorney-General OF Geneva as Prosecutor . 333

VI. The Trial in its Second Phase, continued . .351

VII. The Trial continued. The Attorney-General receives fresh instructions from Calvin . . 366

VI 11. Servetus is visited in Prison by Calvin and the

Ministers 386

IX. The Court determines to consult the Councils AND Churches of the four Protestant Swiss Cantons

X. The Trial is interrupted through Differences between Calvin and the Council

XI. The Trial is resumed on new Articles supplied

BY Calvin 398

XII. The Trial continued. Servetus addresses a

LETTER TO CaLVIN AND PETITIONS HIS JUDGES . 423

XIII. Calvin anticipates the Judges in their Appeal

TO the Swiss Churches 428

.XIV. Servetus sends a Letter and a second Remonstrance and Petition to his Judges . . 441

XV. The Swiss Councils and Churches are addressed

HY the Council of Geneva 446

XVI. Servetus again addresses the Syndics and Council of Geneva, and accuses Calvin. The answers of the Councils and Churches consulted

XVII. The Attitude of Calvin. The Hopes of Servetus

.Win. Thk Sentence and Execution. V/E Victis ! . . 480

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER iJi-j>i

XIX. After the Battle. V^e Victoribus ! ... 488

XX. Calvin defends himself 49^

XXI. Calvin's Defence is attacked 5 '7

XXII. Calvin's Biographers and Apologists . . .528

Book I. Early Life— Works— Arrest And Trial At Vienne

'y

Chapter I. Michael Servetus, His Birth, Parentage, And Early Education

Michael Serveto, or as we know him best by his name with the Latin termination, Servetus, appears, from the most trustworthy information we possess, to have been born either at Tudela, in the old Spanish kingdom of Navarre, or at Villaneuva, in that of Aratrc^n ; but whether here or ihere, and in the \ car 1509 or 151 1, is an open question. In the course of the Trial he stood at Vienne in Dauphiny, in the spring of 1553, he says himself that he is a native of Tudela, and forty-two years of age ; which would make Navarre the country, and 151 1 the year, of his birth. But in the Geneva Trial, only four months later, he declares that he is of Villanova, and forty-four years old ; which would give us Aragon as the land, and 1509 as the date, of his nativity. When he spoke of himself as a Navarrese at Vienne, it may have been done to conciliate his French judges, Navarre having once been a province of France, and the natives of the two countries having still much in common. It was at a moment, too, when

MICH A EL SER VET US.

he had paramount motives for seeking to conceal his identity. When he said at Geneva that he was ' Espagnol Arragonois de Villeneuve ' and forty-four, he was face to face with one who knew him well, and when he had neither motive nor opportunity for concealment. Servetus's subscription of himself as ' Michael Serveto, alias Reves, de Aragonia, Hispanus,' on the title-page of his first work ; as ' Michael Villanovanus,' on the titles of all the books he edited, and the name ' Villeneuve' by which alone he was known through the whole of the years he lived in France, to say nothing of the ' M. S. V.,' evidently Michael Servetus Villanovanus, on the last leaf of the ' Christianismi Restitutio,' the printing of which led to his death, supply, as it seems, preponderating evidence as to the place of his birth, though the year may still be left uncertain. The alias Reves which appears on the title of the book ' De Trinitatis Erroribus,' the firstfruits of his genius, has hitherto been a puzzle and subject of debate with his biographers, but can now be satisfactorily interpreted. Servetus's mother, it appears, was of French extraction, of the Reves family, and her son took occasion in his first work piously to preserve his mother's family name beside his proper patronymic.^ Of the parents of Servetus, hov/ever, we in fact know

^ The Reverend Henry ToUin, Pastor of the French Protestant Church, of Magdeburg, who has made the hfe and works of Servetus the particular subject of his studies for many years, inchnes to Tudela as the place, and 15 1 1 as theyear, of Servetus's birth. See his ' Servet's Kindheitund Jugend' in Kahnis^ Zeitschrift fiir die Hisiorische Theologie. Jahrg. 1875, S. 545.

EARLY LIFE.

little more than that we have from himself when, on his trial at Geneva, he informed the Court that they were d'anciejine race, vivaiits nobleinent, of old families and independent, or in easy circumstances, and that his father was a Notary by profession. Report adds that he was of a. family which had been jurists for generations, and that his father was nearly related to Andrea Serveto d'Aninon, some time Professor of Civil Law in the University of Bologna, subsequently member of the Cortes of Aragon, and one of the Council of the Indies. So much makes it clear that Michael Servetus was of gentle blood, of Christian parentage, and neither of Jewish nor Moorish descent, as has been said on no better ground apparently than that he shows he was acquainted with Hebrew, had read the Koran, and in his writings is not intolerant towards Jews and Mahomedans, like his countrymen.

Neither have we any very precise information as regards Servetus's earlier years and education. Of somewhat slender build, and so of presumably delicate constitution, though he showed no trace of this in after life, he is said to have been destined by his parents to the service of the Church ; in which view, whilst yet a youth, he was placed for nurture in one of the convents of his native town or its neighbourhood. And this we should imagine must almost necessarily be true ; for the rudiments of the liberal education Servetus shows himself to have received, could only have been obtained in the early part of the sixteenth century in the quiet

MICHAEL SERVE T US.

of the cloister, and under the fosterino- care of some monk more learned than the general.

The precocious ability and pious temperament with which we must credit Servetus may have been a further motive for the line of life chalked out for him by his parents. The Church was then, as it still continues to be, the close through which an easy and a pious life can be best secured where there is neither talent nor aspiration ; as it is also the highway to w^orldly wealth and power, where there is ambition and ability to back what passes for piety. By mental and moral endowment Servetus probably appeared to all about him a born churchman, with the crosier, and even the cardinal's hat, in perspective. But side by side with so much that pointed in this direction, the reasoning, sceptical, and self-sufficing nature of the man that led the opposite way, as It had not yet appeared, so was it unsuspected. Servetus as a youth unquestionably received the education that would have fitted him for the Priesthood ; and we think complacently of the solace and relaxation from the monotony of monastic life, which the worthy brother we evoke as his principal teacher found in imparting all he knew, and pointing out the onward way to one both apt and eager to learn. Before leaving the convent, or the convent school, where he doubtless remained for several years, Servetus must have been not only a tolerable Latin scholar, but, it may have been, also grounded in Greek and the rudiments of Hebrew.

EARLY LIFE.

At what ao"e Servetus left his convent teachers we are not Informed ; some time however, we should imagine, before definitive vows are required of the youthful aspirant to the holy office, when aptitude for the prospective vocation is made subject of particular inquiry. Now it may have been that he was discovered to be indifferently qualified by mental constitution to follow further the line of life intended for him — a conclusion to which we are led from all we know of the man in his works. He was pious enough and credulous enouo^h throuo;"h life ; but his reliofion must be of the kind he thought out for himself, and his beliefs of his own fashioning, not such as could be presented to him ready shaped for acceptance. The very air of Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century was alive with mutterings of the storm tliat had lonor been o:atherincr and found vent at lencfth through the manly voice of Martin Luther ; and when we find hints that fears of the Inquisition had had something to do with Servetus's subsequent movements, we are disposed to imagine that the call to free thought which had sprung up on the revival of letters and found out the northern Monk in his cell, had also reached the Friar of the south, and from him flowed over upon the receptive mind of his youthful scholar.

Be this as it may, when twelve or fourteen years of age, Servetus appears to have entered as a student at the University of Saragossa, then the most celebrated

MICHAEL SERVE TUS.

in Spain ; and if he had Peter Martyr de Angleria among the number of his teachers, as we are assured he had,' he was in the hands of one of the most accomphshed as well as liberal-minded men of his age. Angleria was in fact still more distinguished as a scholar, diplomatist, teacher and writer, than as a soldier. Having come to Spain in the suite of one of the Italian embassies to Ferdinand and Isabella, he joined the army of the Catholic king and queen as a volunteer, and having distinguished himself on more than one occasion in the field, he was presented to the sovereigns on the conclusion of hostilities, entered the service of Isabella, in especial, and having taken orders — an indispensable condition to acknowledgment as a teacher — he was engaged by the queen as tutor and general supervisor of the education of the host of young noblemen and gentlemen who thronged the Court. The influence exerted by such a man in such a situation cannot be doubted ; and it has been surmised that ' more than one of the distinguished personages who appeared in Spain, in the early part of the sixteenth century, owed not a little of all that made them notable in after life to their teacher. Angleria was in fact a

' Vide Tollin : ' Servet's Kindheit und Jugend,' in Kahnis' Zeitschrtft fiir die Historische Theologie, 1875,8.557. We have, however, searched in vain for any evidence of Angleria's presence in Saragossa at any time, even as a casual resident. In his comprehensive and highly entertaining work, the ' Opus Epistolarum,' we find letters of his from Valladolid, Burgos, Vittoria, Madrid, and elsewhere, but not one from Saragossa during the years covered by Servetus's stay at the university, according to ToUin.

EARLY LIFE.

man in advance of his age, morally, and, we must believe, religiously also — although Spain was not always the devoted slave of Rome we have been accustomed to think her in these our days. He had seen enough in his campaigning and its consequences to disgust him with conversions to Christianity at the point of the sword, and the wholesale deportation from their native country of a great civilised community because of their adhesion to the religion of their fathers. An Italian by birth, it was no part of Angleria's religion to hate Jews and Saracens with such a hatred as made baptizing, banishing, torturing and putting them to death the virtue it appeared in the eyes of the Spaniards.

At Saragossa Servetus may have remained four or five years, working hard at all that qualified him to appear as he meets us in after life — perfecting himself in classics, and introduced not only to the Ethics of 7\ristotle and the scholastic philosophy, but also to the more positive domains of human knowledge — the mathematics, astronomy and geography — geography more especially, brought into vogue as it was by the great discoveries of Columbus, Vasco de Gama. and the hardy navigators and travellers who came after tliem, then made accessible to the general reader by the works of Angleria, Grynaeus and others.

Having broken definitively with the idea of the Church as a calling, Servetus must now have made up his mind to follow what might fairly be spoken of as

MICHAEL SERVE TUS.

the hereditary vocation of his family — Law ; and the School of Toulouse being at this time the most celebrated in Europe, to Toulouse he was sent as a student of Law by his father. Here he seems to have remained for two or three years — short while enough in which to fathom the intricacies of civil and canon law, to say nothing of other studies that must have continued to engage some share of his attention ; but that the time given to the study of Law at Toulouse was not misspent, is proclaimed by the occasional scraps of legal lore we notice interspersed in his writings. In the covenant between God and Abraham, to cite one among many instances, he observes that we have the first case on record of one of the four forms of unindentured contract, still spoken of as the form Facto ut facias. Elsewhere also, and at other times, on his trial at Geneva in particular, he is credited by his prosecutor with an adequate knowledge of the Pandects, although he says himself that he had never done more than read Justinian in the perfunctory manner usual with young men at college. On the occasion referred to, nevertheless, we find him quoting the decisions of jurisconsults in support of his conclusions. But Law, we believe, was never the subject that engrossed the thoughts of Servetus. The natural bent of his mind, and the teaching he had received during his earlier years, led him to Theology ; and it was at Toulouse, as he tells us himself, that he first made acquaintance with the Scriptures of the Old and New

EARLY LIFE.

Testaments. It is not difficult to imagine the effect which the perusal of these writings must have produced on the ardent religious temperament of Servetus. In his earliest work he speaks of the Bible as a book come down from heaven, the source of all his philosophy and of all his science— language, however, that is to be seen as hyperbole to a great extent ; for he was already imbued with scholastic philosophy, and, we must presume, with patristic theology also, before he had read a word of the Bible ; and in his published works we find him at various times subordinating the teachinor of the Scriptures to the conclusions of his reason. Toulouse, indeed, in the early part of the sixteenth century, Avas an unlikely school for religious study in any but the most rigidly orthodox fashion ; and how far Michael Servetus swerved from this — to his sorrow — need not now be more particularly noticed. It was even the boast of the Toulousans for long, that their city had not been infected with what was spoken of as the poison of Lutheranism. So strict a watch had been kept over them by their shepherds, the priests, that, whilst in neighbouring and other more distant cities of France the Reformation had many adherents, it had none — openly, at all events — in Toulouse. It were needless to insist that training of a special kind, in addition to originality and independence of mind, was required to lead to views and conclusions such as those attained to by Servetus.*

' Tollin (Toulouser Studenten-Lcben im Anfang des i6ten Jahr-

12 MICHAEL SEE VET US.

He had read the Bible, however, at Toulouse ; and there, too, if it were not at an earlier period, he must have met with some of the writings of Luther, of which several had been translated into Spanish soon after their publication.^ But there is another book which enjoyed an extensive reputation through the whole of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and seems to supply the kind of aliment precisely of which a mind constituted like that of Servetus must have felt the want. This is the ' Theologia Rationalis sive Liber de Creaturis' of Raymund de Sabunde, in which the Creator is reached by a gradual ascent from lower to higher grades of created things.

The ' Rational Theology ' of Sabunde is indeed a most noteworthy book ; full of true piety, resting on the wider and surer grounds of nature at large in harmony with human intelligence, than the dogmatic theologian can show in the written text and unwritten traditions on which he relies for his conclusions. Containing no word that is not thoroughly orthodox, doctrine, nevertheless, is not that which it is the grand object of the ' Rational Theology ' of Sabunde to propound. Neither is authority paraded, as it would have been had the book been written by a professed

hunderts), in Riehl's Historisches Taschenbuch von 1874, S. 76, speaks as if he had been present with Servetus at Toulouse ; accompanied him over the St. Michael's bridge that spanned the Garonne ; beheld the iron cage suspended from its balk above the river for ducking heretics until they died; looked on at the religious processions that filed incessantly through the streets, etc.

1 McCrie's Hist, of the Reformatioti in Spain.

theologian, instead of a pious naturalist ; for Sabunde was a physician, one of the guild whose destiny it is to lead the van of progress. We cannot believe that the work, though often reprinted, was ever heartily approved by the heads of the Church of Rome. Its title went far to condemn it. The. Roman Catholic Church I

requires faith, submissiveness, subserviency, not reason,^ j

of its sons ; and we are not, therefore, surprised to find that though the ' Rational Theology ' of Sabunde, as a whole, long escaped being placed on the index of prohibited books, the prologue with which we find one of the early editions, if it be not the first (Argentorati, 1496), introduced, was soon ordered to be expunged ; nor, indeed, as culture extended and the Reformation spread, with ever-increasing alarm to the dominant Church, that the book itself was at length pointedly forbidden to be read by the faithful. It was put upon the ' Index' by the Congregation of the Council of Trent in 1595, the author 'holding too much by Nature,' say the reverend councillors, ' to give us a knowledge of God and his providential dealing with the world, and making too little reference to the Fathers and the authority of Holy Writ.'

The Prologue of Sabunde is in truth a very remarkable piece of writing, the age considered in which it flowed from the pen. Beginning in the accredited orthodox fashion : ' Ad laudem et gloriam altissimai et gloriosissimcE Trinitatis,' &c., the author proceeds to say that his purpose is ' to expose the errors, as well of the ancient philosophers as of pagan and infidel writers, by the science he has to propound ; to set forth the cathohc faith in its infalhble truthfuhiess, and to show every sect opposed thereunto in its necessary falsity and erroneousness. Two books,' he / continues, ' are given to us by God for our guidance : y one, the universal book of created things, or the book of Nature ; the other, the boo^ of the sacred Scriptures. The first was given to man from the beginning, when the world was made ; the second is to supplement and solve the difficulties met with in the first. The book of the Creatures lies open to all ; but the book of the Scriptures can only be read aright by the clergy. The book of Nature cannot be falsified, neither can it be readily interpreted amiss, even by heretics ; but the book of the Scriptures they can misconstrue and falsify at their pleasure.' The author's design, therefore, is to write a book which gentle and simple alike may read and understand without a master ; and he ends his prologue with a compliment and submission to Holy Mother Church, which her hierarchs, however, have not accepted either gratefully or graciously ; for they did not of old, any more than they do now, want books that 1 would enable readers to go their own way without the guiding hand of a master. Shall we wonder, therefore, that this notable prologue was looked on at an early date as highly objectionable, and is not to be found in any of the later editions of the book ? ^